I serve on the Wake County Sustainability Task Force that is charged with providing the county commissioners with recommendations to improve the sustainability of water, energy and solid waste.
I offered this definition as an alternative to the usual definition used by many environmentalists:
Definition of Sustainability: Meeting the needs of the present and
future generations by using privatized resources based on incentives produced
by a fully functioning price system.
To illustrate my definition I sent the following to the Task Force members:
This link provides an example from the N&O that indicates the importance on our definition of sustainability. Forcing taxpayers and utility rate payers to subsidize an industry selected by lobbyists, politicians and bureaucrats is not the way to achieve sustainability in energy or any other area. Once the subsidies run out it is highly likely that this operation will fold.
Anyone remember the Synfuels Corporation of the early 1980s?
And this link is an article from Arizona about a solar plant that recently went belly up. This example indicates the futility of government picking winners and losers. There is little or no evidence that politicians and bureaucrats, who are motivated by votes and budget increases, are better at providing a sustainable use of resources than millions of individuals making choices about how to spend their own money.
